It is by turning, then, to the concrete whole of social-mental life, and especially to the moral and legal values of distribution, that we break the circle[176] of our economic values. Economics has failed to profit by the example of the other social sciences here. Ethics has frankly recognized the tremendous import of economic values for ethical values. Jurisprudence has frankly accepted the fact that law grows, in large part, out of economic needs--even though it remains behind the needs of the present economic situation. But economic theory has sought to make itself too much a thing apart, to isolate its phenomena from other phases of social life, and has busied itself exclusively with "utility" and "cost" and "prices," and the like. And where the economist has consented to consider the relations between his own field and adjacent fields, he has done so with a preconception of the priority of his own phenomena, and his results have been an "economic" interpretation of history, ethics, jurisprudence, etc. That the economic interpretation of the other fields has much to commend it is certain, but it is equally certain that law and morality react on economic values, especially in the higher stages of civilization. This has been so fully and convincingly stated by Professor Seligman, in his _Economic Interpretation of History_, that I forego further elaboration here. One comment is necessary however: even though we might grant Marx and Buckle that the physical environment and the progress of economic technique are of ultimate ruling significance for the direction of social progress, it is still a far cry from that doctrine to the doctrine that the "utilities" and "costs" directly connected with the production and consumption of economic goods, in the minds of individual men, are an adequate explanation of anything.